


Ren

by Lyn_Laine



Series: The Big Six [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Female Edward, Female Edward Elric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 15:13:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12368430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyn_Laine/pseuds/Lyn_Laine
Summary: A female Edward tells us the autobiography of her life.  Manga centric.





	Ren

Prologue

Let’s start with the basics. My name is Florence Elric, Ren for short, mostly because I refused to be called Flo from the time I was a very young child. I was always rather stubborn and perceptive that way. Flo sounded like the name of someone cheerful, bubbly, and slightly air headed, and I was a lot of awful things but none of those traits made that list. Yeah, I know, Florence is a horrible name, so I insisted on a nickname and I insisted on Ren.

I was born to Trisha Elric and Van Hohenheim of Resembool, a small rural village in the country of Amestris, in the winter of 1899, on October 11th. My younger brother Alphonse followed a year behind me. My first few years were relatively happy, what little I can remember of them, but then my father left our family. Just walked out of the house one day and never came back. I was four. It was very sudden; he gave no warning, no rationale. He never even sent a letter.

So I was left with my mother and Al as my family - we were known as the Elric family, as if my Dad had never existed, and that was the way I preferred it. We stayed living in Resembool, living in peace in a small rural village, though I always got the suspicious feeling Mom stayed in Resembool because she hoped my bastard of a Dad would one day turn back up looking for us. Of course, he never did.

Life wasn’t perfect. Whereas Al was allowed to run around outside and act like a little boy, my Mom wanted me to act like a little girl, to be more traditionally feminine, even motherly. I saw no value in such an act and anyway I wasn’t like that. Tomboyish and fiery and nontraditional, I constantly refused to oblige her. 

This was compounded when me and Al began sneaking inside Dad’s old study, back when we were still children. Dad had been an alchemist, and we started reading his alchemy books - even understanding them. I displayed a talent for alchemy at a young age alongside my brother, my talent perhaps even surpassing his. Though she was overjoyed and astonished by both displays of talent, my Mom worried about me because a female alchemist was virtually unheard of at the turn of the twentieth century. I saw her worry as a rejection and took it deeply personally. My mind opened up by the possibilities of science, I began to dream of a professional scientific career and a life in a big city. Resembool was suddenly not enough for me anymore.

This made me even more unlike my mother, a homemaker, washer, and sewer who had always lived in small villages all her life and had wanted nothing more. Friction sprang up and then fights began happening, fights that worried the good-natured younger peacemaker Al.

Then Mom contracted an illness that had been spreading in the area and died, relatively quickly and quite suddenly. Abruptly, the Mom I had been fighting with wasn’t there anymore. Me and my brother were orphaned, still children.

Wrought with guilt and conflicted feelings in the aftermath of the death of my mother, I became a deadly dark, quiet girl, adding fuel to my fiery nontraditional nature. I determined that my first true display of alchemy would be to find a way to bring my mother back from the dead, and fix everything I felt I had broken. Al, who also wanted Mom back and was also an aspiring alchemist, agreed to go on this journey with me.

We spent the next few years living on our own in the Elric family home, financially supported by our close childhood friend Winry Rockbell and her grandmother Pinako - both of whom ran the local automail business and were quite rebellious women for their time on their own. Al and I pursued the alchemical knowledge necessary for our planned resurrection, intensively studying. I took over all the mothering duties from my Mom and I gained a newfound appreciation for what my mother had gone through, raising children alone - an appreciation that came far too late. I became a tough but fair, practical sort of caregiver to my brother, who was as always gentle and accommodating. 

Although we had gained a great deal of information and comprehension regarding the extended basics of the craft of alchemy, before long it became apparent that even as prodigies there was only so far we could go while being self taught. We had reached a roadblock.

In a stroke of good fortune, Resembool was visited by an exceptionally skilled alchemist named Izumi Curtis. After some persuasion, she agreed to take us on as her apprentices provided we pass a preliminary test. I was particularly excited and impressed, as Izumi was a tough woman and the first female alchemist I had ever heard of. In fact, I think my gender and genuine interest might have been one of the reasons why she agreed to give us a chance herself.

Izumi brought us to a small, deserted island, Yock Island, situated near the town of Dublith in the southern region of Amestris. Izumi told us that we would have to survive together on this island for one full month alone without alchemy. If, at the end of our ordeal, we could correctly explain the concept of “One is All and All is One”, we would begin our training under her wing.

On Yock Island, Al and I discovered self-reliance and gained new abilities and insights about living in the world under our own power. Being forced to learn basic survival while alone in the world, we had to forage and hunt for food as well as fend off periodic attacks from Mason, an employee at the Curtises’ butcher shop who had disguised himself as a masked wild man at Izumi’s behest. (Izumi kept much closer track of us than we thought she was.) I became very fierce and economical in my ability to survive on my own with little help. Coming to realize that, as a human, I was but a small part of the world and the universe as a whole, but that the world and the universe could not exist without the sum of its connected smaller parts, it was I who correctly answered Izumi’s riddle properly when she finally returned for us.

I still contend that it was two parts increased self understanding, one part delirium from trying to survive dirty and sweaty on a deserted island without alchemy for a month. But whatever. The point is, it worked.

For the next five months, we were subjected to Izumi’s intensive alchemy and martial arts training, growing significantly in both mind and body and gaining a great deal of alchemical knowledge. Izumi was the person who taught me how to combine all of my traits together into one whole alchemist and fighter - my fiery nontraditional nature, my deadly dark and quiet, my tough but fair practicality in caring for others, my fierce and economical survival instinct - and who taught me never to be apologetic for my gender. 

Like with my mother, Izumi and I had a surprisingly mixed relationship. I wanted in my own tough way that I wouldn’t openly admit to for Izumi to be the more modern mother figure I never had. Izumi had lost an infant child long ago and was unwilling to provide that sort of maternal comfort to someone.

After our training, Al and I returned to the house in Resembool. Though instructed specifically by Izumi to understand that death is an irreversible part of the flow of the world and that acceptance of such is important to the “One is All, All is One” concept, we dove headlong into our plan to resurrect our mother upon our homecoming. We had advanced our knowledge while abroad and discovered the basics to a forbidden practice called Human Transmutation - essentially, it was alchemy on people, either to change them or to create them entirely. Our plan was to create a new body for Mom and use our blood to return her essential self and soul to her.

Human Transmutation was against the law and forbidden by alchemical practice. Arrogantly, I assumed not only that this was because no one had ever done it successfully, but that I could do it myself at eleven years old. Al, my fellow alchemist, was ten. We were prodigies, I told myself. We could do what no one else could do.

Our motivations here were more than simple grief. I had headlined the project, and I had dreams of somehow impressing both Trisha and Izumi with my miracle of resurrection, gaining not only motherly love and approval but the kind of general parental approval I’d never felt I’d had. Al had nostalgic dreams of returning to an ideal past era in our lives, and was also used to following me in all things.

Devising a Transmutation Circle, amassing the elemental ingredients for an adult human body and offering some of our own blood as soul and biological data, we secretly initiated Human Transmutation in our old home one night, in Dad’s old study where we had first discovered alchemy. The Human Transmutation resulted in a Rebound. We were pulled inside The Gate, a strange portal where all alchemy seemed to pass through and where grave alchemical punishments were judged.

I met a mysterious being called Truth, a strange shadow with a leering mouth full of white teeth and a high, eerie voice. Truth always seemed to be mocking whoever they were talking to. Truth showed me a peek into the Gate’s vast wealth of alchemical knowledge, a process only some of which I remember and the heaviness of which nearly broke my screaming mind into its most essential elements. Then Truth exacted their penance, for not only had I crossed into God’s domain, I had seen some of the Gate’s knowledge itself.

Truth had countless little shadow assistants with reaching hands and long fingers. They ripped my left leg off of me from the knee below, leaving me screaming again and my leg a bloody stump, to say nothing of my sheer terror. Maimed and bleeding, I was dumped back into the human dimension in the shadowy, smoke filled dark study.

Alphonse had not been returned. That had been the other punishment exacted. The Gate had taken all of him, showing him nothing in return.

For all that, the transmutation was a failure. The mother we had attempted to revive was a grotesque mass of organs only capable of sustaining human life for a few gasping, horrific moments before dying altogether. I watched the thing die in front of me.

I had been left with one last “gift” from the Gate. I could now perform alchemical transmutations by simply clapping my hands together, without the aid of a Transmutation Circle. Izumi was the only other alchemist I could think of who could do this, the implications of which my mind shied away from for a very long time. That I had made the exact same mistake as my teacher who had lost her child was too horrific to contemplate.

Desperate to at least have my brother back, I willfully performed another Human Transmutation to call him back to me, this time sacrificing my right arm from the shoulder down in exchange for Al’s soul. I bounded that soul alchemically to an antique suit of armor in a corner of Dad’s study, drawing the Blood Rune on the top inside of the armor and activating it before passing out from sheer blood loss.

I would wake up in the Rockbell home. Al as a suit of armor had carried me at a run to Pinako and Winry’s house, where they had performed an emergency surgery as medically and engineering inclined people. They saved my life, but nothing could bring back my lost limbs or my brother’s body.

I don’t remember much of the following days. Physically I recovered fine, but I was confined to a wheelchair and remained in a sort of dazed stupor. I was now a cripple, and a broken young girl. Without a right arm, I couldn’t even perform the alchemical gift I had been so blessed with.

I realized - again too late - that I had been so busy wanting acceptance from others and wishing for my childhood back, I had ignored all the signposts that were right in front of me telling me I was going in the wrong direction.

I remained that way until a certain Lieutenant Colonel Roy Mustang, a state alchemist monikered The Flame Alchemist for his ability to produce fire at will, arrived in Resembool on an inaccurate tip regarding possible State Alchemist candidates. Upon discovering the bloody remains of our failed experiment in our house, he confronted me at the Rockbell home. I do remember what he looked like - twenty two at the time and already a decorated war hero from the Ishballan War, tall, trim, dark-haired, and handsome with black eyes in a military uniform, accompanied by his second in command Riza Hawkeye.

But mostly I remember what he did for me. Instead of passing my crime on to any authority figure, he persuaded me to consider joining the State Alchemist program. He was the first one to point out to me that alchemy might enable me to restore my limbs and my brother’s body someday - and what better way to make that happen than through the resources available to a State Alchemist of Amestris?

The thing that strikes me most in retrospect is that he saw a prodigy instead of a crippled young girl. There were almost no female State Alchemists at the time and most were full adults, but this did not seem to matter very much to Mustang. In spite of his long and proud series of casual flirtations with women, I would learn later that Mustang was at heart an idealist who wanted to become Fuhrer so he could exact change for the better. All he saw was potential.

He left - but suddenly, I had a hope and a purpose. Clearer-headed and more adult now, and driven by the guilt of what I had done to my ever patient and constantly understanding little brother, I commissioned Pinako and Winry to craft me a female-shaped automail arm and leg so that I could follow Mustang’s advice. When told that the surgery would be excruciatingly painful and the recovery would take at least three years, I pointed out that my temporary pain was nothing compared to what Alphonse had given up. He couldn’t even eat or feel human contact in that suit of armor.

I promised that I would finish my recovery in one year - and I did.

In the fall of 1911, my recovery finished and my new automail limbs complete, I was twelve years old. Mustang came back to Resembool and traveled personally with me to Central City, the Amestrian capital, so that I could apply for State Alchemist certification. After passing the written examination and (by some miracle) the psychological evaluation, I had the practical. Even Fuhrer King Bradley came, fascinated by this twelve year old girl passing State Alchemist certification exams.

Hard, dark, quiet, sarcastic, and talented, I was commended for “superb and unique ability” as well as “sheer brazenness.” I had tried to fake attack Fuhrer King Bradley with an alchemically created weapon using just my two hands - in order to point out to him the dangers of revealing himself in such an open and vulnerable position. My fake attack failed, and I think Mustang was half-afraid I’d get sacked but instead by order of the Fuhrer I became a State Alchemist immediately.

Within a week, I was issued my license and the moniker “Fullmetal Alchemist”, a nod to my false limbs. On October 3rd, I returned by train back to Resembool, packed up all my belongings, and - together with Al, Pinako, and Winry - I burned the old Elric home to the ground. Without it, me and my brother would have no means of turning back from our goal. 

Alphonse had insisted on taking this journey with me. He would be a good partner, I decided - not only a fighter and an alchemist, but someone who couldn’t be hurt or killed unless his hidden Blood Rune was somehow speared through. Besides, if he wanted to go, Al deserved to just as much as me.

So that day, October 3rd, I left with Alphonse on a chilly fall evening to find a way to restore us both back to normal.

I was put under the now Colonel Roy Mustang in his platoon at East City, as Major Ren Elric. The positioning was always slightly uncomfortable, not only because of mutual animosity (he was a womanizer and I was a progressive; he believed in professional manners and I didn’t) tinged with strong respect, but because State Alchemists under some laws were all independent soldiers and under an equivalent of the same rank. And I was the only other State Alchemist in his platoon. Even Riza Hawkeye, still silent and serious and ever at his side, was a markswoman and a gun expert. Still, he agreed to send me mainly on military missions that would help me in my quest to find information about a Philosopher’s Stone, an alchemical amulet of sorts that might just have enough power to restore me and Al our bodies back. I spent much of my time on those missions, traveling by train, Alphonse always in tow.

When I was back in East City, however, I took full advantage of it. 

Though State Alchemists were back then treated with some animosity by a general suspicious public, they were still widely respected, and I was now a respected professional alchemist - one of the only females in state rankings. I did another thing I’d always promised myself I’d do, and took full advantage of city life.

I used my automail to my advantage and - unusually and purposefully for a woman - I wore it openly and brazenly, adding certain clothes to create a dark feminine cyberpunk sort of fashion sense. I made many of my own clothes, which helped. I had a slim and lithe rod-like body, long asymmetrical blonde hair, golden eyes like a cat’s, and a diamond face shape.

In addition to science, through city life I became fascinated by art and culture. I also started nights out dancing and flirting on my own. I flirted in my own forward, headstrong, colorfully blunt way and it always seemed to give the recipient a pleasant and charmed surprise. For some reason, I got a somewhat unintentional reputation as being funny. But there was no actual sex - I promised myself that I would only even consider having sex when I was sixteen and of legal age for sexual intimacy, though not marriage. That was eighteen.

And so this became my life: missions to away places with Alphonse, and leaving the military barracks while at East City to enjoy city life. I only ever returned to Resembool for Winry and Pinako when I needed automail adjustments, for they truly were the best and as my closest friends I did sometimes badly miss them. Winry was a fiery girl, Pinako her iron tough and just as fierce matron.

The real story starts four years into this journey - when I was sixteen and Al was fifteen. My tale begins during a very certain away mission we had while searching for the Philosopher’s Stone…


End file.
